USDA

Updated Friday Oct. 25: Refrigerated, ready-to-eat salads from two firms have been hit with government recalls because of possible contamination with dangerous listeria, both the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration announced. Sign up for the AARP Health Newsletter Listeria can cause serious and sometime fatal infections in young children, frail or elderly people, and individuals with weakened immune systems. Symptoms include high fever, severe headache, stiffness, nausea, abdominal pain and diarrhea. Listeria infection can cause …

If you grabbed a cotton dress shirt out of the dryer this morning and put it on without ironing it, you probably should be thanking a chemist named Ruth Benerito. In the mid-1960s, Benerito and two colleagues at the U.S. Department of Agriculture developed and patented a process for chemically cross-linking and reinforcing the chains of cellulose molecules in cotton fibers, which enabled them to stay in place under the stress of washing and wear. The “wrinkle-free” garments that manufacturers produced …

Everyone from chefs to health experts to the first lady has touted eating locally grown food, praising it for its freshness because it doesn’t have to travel far to get to consumers. Which is why it was stunning to learn this month that chickens raised and slaughtered in the U.S. may soon be sent for cooking and processing to China, then sent back to the U.S. to be sold in fast-food restaurants and supermarkets. Sign up for the AARP Health …

Just about every cookbook icon, from Julia Child to Martha Stewart to the Joy of Cooking’s Rombauer sisters, has told us to rinse off our raw chicken before preparing it. Guess what? They were wrong, scientists say. Rinsing raw chicken to get rid of the bacteria just spreads it around more, increasing our risk of getting sick, says food-safety researcher Jennifer Quinlan, with Drexel University in Philadelphia and one of the developers behind a new “Don’t Wash Your Chicken!” campaign. …

Packing up the car for a beach or lake vacation? Keep food safe by making sure your cooler stays cold enough during the drive. The key is keeping food below 40 degrees F. so that bacteria can’t grow, say the food safety experts at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Follow their handy cooler checklist and you’ll truly be able to chill out: Use plenty of ice or frozen gel packs; have one insulated cooler for raw meat, poultry and seafood, …

The label on the package of ground beef says “all-natural.” What the heck does that mean? Or how about the turkey tenderloin label that says the meat is “antibiotic-free” — can you trust it? While most consumers would like to be able to buy meat or poultry raised without antibiotics — and would even pay a little more for it, according to a new Consumer Reports survey — the problem is determining whether that “antibiotic-free” label really means what it …